


you're a glimpse of bliss, a little taste of heaven

by ag_sasami



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, Dubiously Translated Latin, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Post-Canon, Recovery, Relationship Negotiation, flagrant disregard of grammatical architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 05:12:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13000584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ag_sasami/pseuds/ag_sasami
Summary: After. The sanding down of their broken edges.





	you're a glimpse of bliss, a little taste of heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Wherein we,  
> 1\. look nonchalant and silently agree that they totally had sex in the Barns fade-to-black scene in TRK;  
> 2\. pretend Ronan actually attempts to graduate from Aglionby for reasons that won't actually be explored; and  
> 3\. recognize that everything in between these moments was never going to be puppies and rainbows. 
> 
>  The appropriate musical score: [St. Patrick](https://youtu.be/j2SWk859CEU)

  **I**

In the aftermath--Gansey blessedly, achingly alive and loaded into 300 Fox Way--he follows Ronan back to Monmouth Manufacturing. Climbs the stairs with heavy feet, two steps behind, left hand fingers wholly under his control now threaded between Ronan's own. Their arms are stretched out between them, and Adam feels like he's still trying to keep him anchored to the life he almost lost. When they reach the dusty landing, the familiar scent of cardboard, dust, fresh mint knocks the breath from him. He's so overwhelmingly grateful to be alive, that Ronan is alive, _Gansey_  is alive.

Adam rests his face between Ronan's shoulder blades, fingers still tangled in matching hands. There's a metallic edge to his scent, dark and earthy and sharp. The sense memory carried on that smell--of the tar pouring from his nose, blackening the corners of his mouth as he was unmade on the asphalt--is too fresh.

"Bathroom kitchen," he mumbles into the fabric at Ronan's back. "Find somewhere to sit."

Monmouth is inhabited by barely functional maybe-humans, but trust Ronan to have a first aid kit for all the split knuckles he's managed on his bad days. Ronan settles himself on the lid of the toilet. The stove top smells like over-cooked grease, there's a paper bag of empty beer bottles by the trash, and Adam suppresses a chuckle at finding first aid in a cabinet beside tupperware he didn't know they even owned. Silent, Ronan passively watches Adam dig through the laundry by the fridge with eyes half-lidded. Any other night the look would be calculated, or searching, maybe something soft and shuttered. Even if he had the capacity to translate a look like that tonight, he doesn't think Ronan has a mind for intention right now.

Damp washcloth in hand and standing just between Ronan's knees, Adam instructs softly, "Look up." There's black flaked thick over his upper lip, streaked across to his cheek where he smeared it when the demon was extinguished. His lips are are dry, starting to crack in the corners and stained a dark color much closer to blood than the rest of the black. His collar is stained too, up his neck to where the black-blood pitch oozed out of his ears.

 _While the very fabric of him was devoured_ , Adam thinks, closes his eyes a moment against the onset of aftershocks at the near loss. _Don't panic. Don't panic._

He sets to clearing the flaking sludge from his face. Light clings to the pale curve of Ronan's cheek, skin flushing pink and alive where Adam exposes warm skin with the washcloth. Stains seem to be the worst of him now physically, unmaking reversed the moment Gansey died for him. Adam doesn't realize he's shaking until he feels Ronan's hands warm and raised to settle firmly against his ribs.

"Hey," Ronan's voice is hoarse, something close to broken around his quiet, "I'm alive." It helps to still the anxious tremors Adam now notices racing through his arms and the hands that stopped being his for that terrifying stretch of destruction. He goes easily when Ronan makes overtures to pull him down to the same level. Adam braces himself with hands soft on Ronan's shoulders, thumb brushing the bit of skin exposed above his collarbone. He tastes vital, blood still on his mouth, and Adam can't begin to care whether or not it's gross because they're both _alive_  tonight.

His need to be under Ronan's skin, to know it's real and he's not just going to slip away again in a fit of breathing wet and shallow, it's a frantic buzzing thing. But Ronan kisses him agonizingly gentle, slow until Adam feels like he could break all over again.

Instead he feels the hum of his anxiety dissipate against Ronan's mouth and neither of them do, pieces left firmly adhering to one another as they should.

 

 

**II**

There's still anger sewn into their muscles, hooked into their veins like a parasite. Calling it personal demons is nearly physically painful given what the actual demon did. Knowing that, Adam thinks it's still a perfect name for what their damage is. It's getting better, the way the fury tears at the fabric of the tentative happiness they're all clinging to like a lifeline, that familiar burn of blindsiding unhappiness becoming less frequent. But it still hasn't gone away.

Narrowly avoiding death you felt rending you body and soul, finding your body and mind your own again when for a terrifying moment it wasn't? It's not enough to undo the way their families are broken, have broken them, the places in their hearts that are stones sinking them alone to the their heavy depths. The fury escapes sometimes, steam from a boiling pot. Red behind the eyes and the urge to destroy, to isolate.

The bruises around Ronan's throat wear from dark purple stains to the sickly yellow green that comes with a few days of healing. Nausea hits Adam in waves when he sees them in the light. Every time. On Saturday, when he lays his hands over the marks the demon used him to make, Ronan goes rigid beneath him like he knows what's coming.

"Don't you fucking dare." There isn't heat behind it, but it's a clear warning. Adam can read him, spent weeks watching and wanting so desperately to _know_. So he understands that the delivery was meant to be stonily cold, despite the horrible way it missed the mark, resolving as openly wounded. He runs his thumbs over the edges of bruises in the shape of his fingers, doesn't push into them the way he wants to, like he could bury them back under Ronan's pale Irish skin.

Ronan doesn't want the apology. Adam feels like he owes him at least that much.

"I'm sorry," he whispers anyway, chokes on the words with apprehension for the consequences. It's _Ronan_  but his brain still tracks a well-worn path of flinching and bracing himself for the worst. They're barefoot in the part of his apartment at St. Agnes that pretends its a kitchen. Sunlight, muted and grey under clouds, presses in through the the window. Ronan jerks away, and Adam rightly assumed Ronan already knew what he was going to say.

He doesn't wear his anger like armor anymore, but it's more explosive when it comes. Without drowning in shitty beer and insomnia ( _I_ _just want to sleep again like I used to._ ), without Kavinsky's parties and the adrenaline of life-threatening races ( _I died once already. I don't feel like courting it_.), the grief and fear get out from behind his defenses sometimes. Adam prefers it this way. That Ronan can let it out without being buried beneath it means there is less grief, that Ronan trusts him with what still exists. This time it's too close though, conflict because he refuses to let Adam be responsible.

They say,

" _You_  didn't do this--"  
"It was _my_  hands, Lynch--"

"--so don't you dare fucking apologize to me, Parrish." Feet in shoes and he's storming out. Adam didn't even bother to react, mind a blank white slate in the abruptness of their escalation. On auto-pilot and in a stunned sort of daze, he finishes getting ready for work in the heavy silence, leaves in the Hondayota for two back-to-back shifts at the factory, the garage.

He comes home late to find Ronan hunched morosely on the front steps of the church. In the eco-bright streetlight Adam has a moment to study him: takes in the curve of his neck, the way his head hangs from it, like his body has lost the ability to align itself; the sharp way his elbows stand out from the muscles of his arms where they're resting over his knees. Sees blood flaked down his fingers, first knuckles looking swollen and bruised as he worries at his fingertips. Adam thinks of brick walls, the way skin abrades against their sandpaper surface.

Adam is exhausted. The sight of Ronan pulls away the last energy in him.

"I'm not cleaning up your blood again." Fingers scratched through the peach-fuzz soft buzz of Ronan's hair to offset the flatness of his delivery as he climbs the steps past him. He heads straight for the bed, sits on the firm edge of it on the floor, heels off his shoes in a disorderly heap; lulled into stillness by the sound of water in the bathroom, Ronan's puttering through the medicine cabinet. He smells like antiseptic and faintly like Monmouth when he sits down on the bed beside Adam, mirroring his position on the front steps.

"Gansey sold Monmouth to keep me in school again," he says after a bit, weary. Adam doesn't know what to say to that, so they sit in silence until Ronan adds, softly, "I'm sorry I left like that this morning." It's such rare vulnerability to offer even to Adam.

"Why?" He means  _why did you leave,_  and  _why exactly are you sorry_?

"I was furious and it wasn't your fault." He waved his bruised hand vaguely to punctuate, "I thought maybe you'd had enough with violence."

There's more to unpack from that answer, but Adam hangs up on the last part. Adam: so attuned to violence, used to it being synonymous with love. That Ronan thought to build him some new architecture for what it should look like, he can't breathe with the weight of the feeling. The silence lasts, stunned, long enough for misunderstanding.

"Jesus. Shit. Never directed at you, you realize that right? I just--"

"Needed to punch a wall. Destroy some _thing_  you care about," Adam interrupts quickly. His throat is tight when he adds, "I know," and hopes Ronan gets that it's experiential understanding. Until Blue saw his anger, when it came screaming red and raw through every cell, Adam hadn't truly understood the shape of it. He takes one of Ronan's hands, runs the pads of his fingers around the cracked skin of his knuckles. "You didn't have to take your anger somewhere else."

"This shouldn't be the place for it." _I don't want to break us,_  he doesn't say, but Adam can read it in the helpless furrow between his eyebrows. Idly he wonders if Gansey warned Ronan in reverse, that he should be careful with Adam. Even as he thinks it he knows this is purely _Ronan_ , startlingly gentle with what he loves.

"Just." He's so tired he doesn't even know how to say everything he needs to right now, settles on, "Don't hide from me, Ronan."

Ronan's hands are warm pressed against his cheeks, and Adam goes easily, turns his face. Eyes, expression wide open and focused intently on him, Ronan says, "Never again," so close Adam feels it echoed against his lips. He chases the promise, follows the leather bands of Ronan's bracelets with his fingers until he feels steady. Opens his mouth under the slick heat of Ronan's tongue along the seam of his lips, until everything narrows to the chapped drag of their lips and the heat spreading through his body.

 

 

**III**

He no longer has to scry to dream into Ronan. When they have the luxury of chasing sleep together, limbs heavy and warm, pressed skin to skin in someone's bed, Adam wakes up inside Ronan's dreams of creation. Its a wonder of some combined magic between them, to watch Ronan make something from nothing without the fear of losing himself in the grey spaces away from his body. Cabsewater is gone, Adam left daunted and human, but somehow he can still do this. It's a gift he doesn't understand, doesn't want to give up.

Weekends are for dreaming.

Ronan gets confused sometimes, when he comes up from dreams so vividly _real_  there's a piece of them still in his hands. When he wakes, everything is cyclical, leaves him uncertain where he falls in the timeline. Most of the time he can bring himself around just fine, see the way everything ticks into place. Usually it happens before he's even free of the sleep paralysis. There are times though, Adam is his anchor to the present, the reminder of how far he's rolled forward in his personal timeline.

The hardest are the dreams that haunt Ronan too long, when he doesn't know whether Adam is a dream or something else. He'll wake up glassy-eyed, perplexed at sharing a bed. In those moments, Adam kneads fingers into Ronan's tension, brushes his mouth over eyelids, temple, shoulder. The intimacy of it, almost too weighty for him, is a reliable tether for Ronan.

" _Amica mea_. Let this be real," Ronan begs, voice quiet but pitched to the panic of asking Cabeswater to save them all. As though some part of his mind already knows it is and is urging the rest to catch up. It's the only time he's gentle with Ronan. Ronan who kisses him like he set the sun in the sky, who manages against all expectations to soothe Adam's frayed nerves. Slow, languid Ronan, content to take his time while Adam gluts himself on the sheer privilege of having him in this way.

"Yes," Adam always breathes. "The most real thing I've known."

He can still himself for this wild-eyed Ronan, can press their lips together carefully, soft and chaste and just _enough_  until Adam sees the fear unspool from his body. Enough for Ronan to close his eyes and open up beneath Adam's mouth, coming slowly back to himself.

He doesn't say "love" except in Latin and in the way he slides his body down to bury his face against Adam's heartbeat.

 

 

**IV**

He thinks Ronan might be afraid of how much Adam wants him. There are always brakes pulled when things escalate, slamming to an abrupt stop. It's not that Adam has an issue with Ronan's boundaries, he just doesn't understand them. Doesn't understand why Ronan will let Adam pin him down like this, both hands above his head, but groaning out, "Parrish, stop. Stop," the moment he's hard and they're both all consumed with _want_ , swollen lips and short of breath.

He does, immediately, hands released and rolling to the side to give them both room to breathe. And when they're flagged, breaths coming more steady, Adam presses.

"Why do we stop?" He doesn't move closer, hears Ronan's sharp intake of breath, the slow sigh he exhales. Adam stares at the ceiling and clarifies, "Is it a Catholic thing? A retroactively not ready thing?" Gives Ronan space to deal with the question.

"Asshole," Ronan breathes, but there's no fire in it.

"It's a puzzle." In the dark he finds Ronan's hand and threads his fingers into it, squeezes gently. "I just want to solve it."

"Why do you still fake away your accent?" It's not an answer and he knows Ronan knows that, but it feels like the shape of one anyway. He considers it, finds the edges of his own answer.

"I don't realize I'm doing it, honestly. It's habit."

"You're still all walled up in your Parrish fortress and you don't even know." The way he says it so plainly derisive burns, and Adam is left speechless and blinking hard in the darkness. He hasn't let go of Adam's hand though.

 _Unknowable_.

It didn't fit the same with Cabeswater gone from him, with Ronan at his side so magnificently _other_  himself. Beautiful, jagged-edged Ronan tore down his defenses the first opportunity he had, cautiously offered the soft vulnerability buried under his beak and claws for no one but Adam. Sex notwithstanding, Adam doesn't want to keep him out in the cold, never trusting him enough to see Adam without his defenses.

"Okay." Decisive and sure and drawled like Henrietta into one lone syllable.

"Okay? That's it?"

"Okay," Adam amended, "I can fix that." Ronan hums dubiously in reply before turning over to throw a heavy arm over Adam's ribs, bury his face against his tense shoulder.

 

* * *

 

Ronan grudgingly goes to class. "Monmouth has to fucking mean something now," venomous at Gansey when he slumps down beside Adam in Latin for the first time in weeks. Adam notes that Gansey looks appropriately chastised while watched, beaming though when Ronan looks away.

Work picks up for Adam and school winds up like a spring loaded to unfurl. The stress of their Senior year grinding ever nearer to a close means even weekends have little space to spend nights together. Adam stumbles from responsibility to responsibility, stealing sleep where he find it, with Ronan when he can. Between times, in the daylight, Adam tries to relearn code-switching in reverse: Henrietta the default, false affluence only when needed. He lengthens his vowels, fades his Rs into them, ignores his Gs. Statistically, he thinks, there's a correlation between his backwater drawl and the private upturn of Ronan's lips when he thinks no one is looking.

Adam is always looking.

He promised to fix it, to bring down his own walls for Ronan. Terrified, he makes it a mission: fiercely earnest, honest in that dodging way Ronan is fluent in, won't be wary of. All the while, Adam watches to make sure he's got it right, that his aim hits its mark instead of wounding.

The first time, Adam grabs his waist, pulls him in close enough that they're sharing breath. "I'm terrified I'm going to hurt you," delivered calm, never quite brushing his lips against Ronan's despite his own desperation for it. Simply steps away and continues on in the direction of class, but not before he catches the stunned moment on Ronan's face, before it breaks into a smile that's all teeth and clever alertness.

 

* * *

 

"When Cabeswater first started speaking to me, I convinced myself I was unknowable." They're waiting in the kitchen for Maura and Calla and Gwenllian to come down and read with Adam. Ronan won't have any part of it still, except the antagonism with Calla, but he comes along anyway. His fingers are cold against the warmth of Ronan's skin, feeling the steady beating of Ronan's heart through the thin skin of his wrist. "It was some arrogant, self-fulfilling bullshit in hindsight." He says it almost under his breath, smiling at the end as Calla stomps down the stairs muttering about snakes in her house.

Ronan stays this time, doesn't escape to the yard, to the BMW, while Maura and Gwenllian argue about the mechanics of reading cards.

 

* * *

 

The clock tells him he has to go to work 5 minutes ago if he's going to make it on time. He has his hands on Ronan's back though, knowing the exact effect tracing the sharp edges of his tattoo has. "That day they tried to arrest you for hitting my father? It was the first time in my life I thought that maybe I deserved better than his fists." He's halfway down the Monmouth stairs before Ronan can gather himself to formulate any kind of response.

 

* * *

 

They're standing outside, leaning against the Pig waiting on Gansey. Adam rubs circles into the knots in Ronan's neck with his thumb, says quietly, "I don't know if I know how to love anything," just as Gansey comes out of Monmouth toward them. Ronan raps his knuckles twice against Adam's hip and doesn't comment further.

 

* * *

 

"I'll drive you to school in the morning," Ronan mumbles. He's in Adam's bed already, curled up with his back along the wall in the space that's starting to smell like him. They're at St. Agnes. Adam has, mercifully, finished everything he has to get done for tomorrow and it doesn't take any pressure to relent. Adam climbs under the sheets, lets Ronan pull him in with an arm around his back.

Being here like this, safe land in a storm, makes Adam miss Cabsewater fiercely. At the end, before the demon took it, before they begged for its life in return for Gansey's, so much of it was _theirs_  alone. Ronan's dream and Adam's sacrifice braided together into the fabric of that place. It's the thing he keeps coming back to. How he shares this with no one else, that nobody in the whole damn world could possibly understand it.

"Greywaren," Adam murmurs against his throat. Ronan stills abruptly, sucks in a long breath. He lets it out on a slow exhale that Adam feels across his scalp before he pushes Adam over onto his back, climbs over top of him until he's pinned beneath Ronan's weight. Knees astride hips, elbows planted above shoulders, just far enough away to keep sight from blurring.

"Say it again." Adam's pulse is thudding in his ears, hot and fast under his skin. Ronan might have whispered or it might be his own heartbeat drowning out the volume in his hearing ear.

" _Greywaren,_ " he repeats just as quietly, locked onto Ronan's fever-bright eyes in the partial dark of the room. "No one will ever be capable of knowing me like you do."

The confession, the only thing Ronan never already _knew_ , leaves his face utterly devastated. Adam lets himself lean into the illicit thrill of the way honesty split him open raw, to the bone; watches the moment Ronan lets himself be hungry again. It's there in the way he runs a thumb over Adam's lower lip, in the way he reverently says, "Magician."

Ronan kisses him deeply. Not the maddening pace meant to slow Adam's train wreck thoughts, but a fundamentally consuming thing. Adam doesn't have a word for it that isn't tainted with near death and loss, the way the intensity of feelings between them wrecks him.

 _Undone_.

In this moment it's as though Ronan was born for ravage rather than dreams, to lay bare every hidden corner of Adam's heart. He knows already. He _knows_  and it doesn't leave him any less blindsided for it when Ronan kisses him like this.

 

 

**V**

When Ronan remakes Cabeswater, Adam smells the moss, the richness of the forest floor. His knees buckle, wrench clattering to the garage floor as he collapses under the intensity of relief at hearing _Magician_  in his head. He is grateful for the music turned up loud on the garage stereo, relatively alone with noises buried beneath the harsh echoing of guitars and drums bounced against concrete and metal.

 _Let me back in_. He wishes his cards weren't tucked into his locker in the staff room. _Amabo te._

There are leaves pressed against his face, water cool and clean in his mouth, the trees rustling,  _Volo autem vos._

It's a sobbing sound that comes out of his mouth, once, chased by a slightly hysterical laugh. Adam doesn't need his cards to understand that.

The rest of his shift passes unnoticed, cars repaired on autopilot like he's watching his body work instead of doing it himself. Being exceedingly late and Thursday, he drives blindly to Monmouth Manufacturing. Now that he's going back to Aglionby like he means to graduate, Adam knows Ronan is sleeping there and not the Barns. He sleeps better these days, which Adam steps around quietly to preserve. Tonight he's decided it's is a good goddamn time to disrupt it wholly if Ronan managed to find any. It's Gansey that answers his pounding on the door, sleep rumpled and snapping instantly to distress when he sees that it's Adam in the middle of the night.

"What's wrong?" he asks even as he reflexively steps aside to let Adam in.

"Nothing. It's a Lynch thing."

"On a Thursday?" Gansey asks, rhetorically Adam hopes, because he's not stopping to explain. It's Ronan, Cabeswater. It's _everything_.

Ronan himself is standing in the middle of cardboard Main Street, shirtless in sweats, headphones around his neck and flashing waning bluetooth blue. Adam can hear music pounding out of them, bass and shrill treble synth. He stalks past Ronan and into his open bedroom door, Chainsaw squawking out a low greeting. Passingly he wonders if that's his personal version of _Kerah_. He fumbles with disabling the stereo's bluetooth, measuring success by the sheer volume that fills the room. Ronan hangs the headphones useless on the doorknob eyeing Adam cooly with something edging on curiosity.

"Close the door," he says as he brings the volume under control, just this side of disruptively loud but no longer deafening.

Adam has him pressed up against the door the moment it clicks closed, absently pleased that Ronan takes a moment to turn the lock. There's grease on his hand still, now streaked lightly across Ronan's cheek where Adams hands are pulling him in, mouth hot like a brand. _Plunder_  is the word that comes to Adam for a moment, taking from Ronan by force, ferocious with his starvation. Until Ronan recovers his surprise and groans into the kiss. Until his arms snake around Adam's waist pulling them flush together, one hand already up the back of his oil-stained shirt.

"It wasn't supposed to speak Latin this time, you know," breathless already, Adam mouthing the stubbled edge of his jaw and down to his neck. "It's your goddamn fault," Ronan adds. None of it even deserve a response, but Adam grins against his skin a moment.

"It doesn't need my hands anymore, my eyes."

Ronan scoffs at that, pushes Adam back a breath to make sure he's watching, listening when he says, "You are Cabsewater masquerading as a human. Of course it needs you." Adam's replying smile is small, as though it's a secret that belongs only to him in that moment, and he buries it open mouthed against Ronan's throat. "It asked for you. I didn't dream that up."

"Why didn't it ask me for another sacrifice?" Mouth below his ear, worrying the lobe in his teeth until Ronan's breath hitches. It takes him a shuddering moment to recover from Adam's heated breath in his ear, teeth in his skin.

"After everything," he tilts his neck, "I wasn't going to dream a Cabeswater," feels Adam's shallow breath: inhale, exhale, "that would make you choose," Adam's mouth rough over his pulse, "between the things you want."

Adam thinks, _magic_. Thinks, _Ronan_. Understands the weight of what that sacrifice would cost him now. He lets Ronan in to trace the roof of his mouth, lick in behind his teeth. Corrects him with, "Not what I want. What I _need_."

The feeling comes in waves as the heat coiling in him melts into his spine, into his legs. They don't quite belong to him, lost in some warm space where his calves feel heavy and his thighs are light to the point he's not sure he can feel them. They don't give beneath him, but he leans his weight into Ronan anyway. To untangle from him feels unbearable. But Adam twists away to let Ronan divest him of his shirt, pulled harshly and stretched over his head, off his arms and lost to the floor. For a moment, Ronan slows, looks at him with bald adoration. Cradles the back of Adam's neck to draw him back in to kiss him deeply, catching Adam's lower lip between his teeth. When the come up for air, Adam turns his face to the ceiling and takes a deep breath, bravely onward.

"How can you love me this much?"

This time it's Ronan's mouth at _his_  throat, looking to devour. Sliding his hands over the curves of Adam's ribs, the sharpness of his shoulder blades, the corded muscle of his back. Pushing him back, and back, mouth everywhere at once, walking him back until his calves hit the low mattress. It's the familiar motions: Ronan waiting for him to get in, Ronan crawling between his legs and bracketing Adam's head between his elbows, Ronan's weight pressing him into the mattress.

Breath in the shell of Adam's ear sets a shiver well timed to Ronan's reply. "How can I not?"

Ronan's body is a live-wire, a spark into so much oil, and Adam is burning with it. Nails scraped against skin, Ronan's fingers buried in his hair. The sound he makes when Adam bends his knees up along Ronan's hips, the broken noise against Adam's mouth sears him with his want to hear it again. He doesn't know what he's doing, blindly chasing Ronan's pleasure, trying to recreate every shake and moan. But he grinds his hips up, revels in the hardness of Ronan against him even through the fabric of denim and sweats.

And Ronan doesn't breathe out  _Parrish_  this time, doesn't ask him to stop.

He digs his fingers into Adam's knees, an anchor, and rocks back against him, grinding against Adam's hip. It's all Adam can do, to say, "Fuck," dazed. To add, "Too many clothes," as he pulls Ronan back into a kiss that's more teeth than lips.

They didn't make it that far the last time, that first night in the Barns. Tumbled from porch to couch, shirts abandoned somewhere. Adam's knees pressed to the back of the couch, feet hanging off the end and Ronan's arms like vines up his back. It was all hunger, Adam rocking down against Ronan arching up into Adam, barely stopping to breathe and never quite bothering with navigating themselves out of pants. For all these weeks Adam has clung to the memory of Ronan's self-stifled moan, his hands sliding down to Adam's hips to hold him in place on a downward roll; the way he keened low in the back of his throat, eyelids fluttering and mouth slack in this new kind of paralysis; how his body was aftershocks thrust briefly against Adam until he came too.

Tonight has the same momentum, the same blind desperation for one another. They fumble. Tangle in untidy sheets, feet stuck in pant legs in desperation to maintain contact. Every time Adam feels the rise of embarrassment, Ronan is there equally uncoordinated. Even between their poorly timed, "Can I?" and "Is this okay?" Adam can't find it in him to be self-conscious in the face of Ronan's bliss.

With Ronan's skin branded across him, Adam's own euphoria is uncomplicated. The graceless way they fall together is grounding, a need to consume one another in ways they will find a way to put into words eventually. For so long he has been _want_. Long before they ever traded unplanned orgasms in Ronan's childhood home, long before Glendower and Cabeswater. For once in his life he can be _take_. He can be _given_.

"I want to touch you."

"Please."

He's loses track of the difference between them in their entwined bodies and skin on skin on skin. But it's the stuttered slide of his dick against Ronan's, against the ridges of sweat-slick fingers that drags him to clumsy rapture. Ronan's saying _Adam_  over and over, punctuating it with half-comprehensible swearing.

Here in Monmouth, far from St. Agnes and Ronan's houses of worship, it still sounds for all the world to him like a benediction.


End file.
